The Environmental Protection Agency [hereinafter EPA] was established on December 2, 1970, under the Nixon administration. Creating the EPA allowed for several environmentally focused groups to be consolidated into one large group, which made it easier for environmentally focused objectives to be met. The Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act, multiple standards for pollution, and many other policies based on the health of the environment can be attributed to the EPA and its efforts. The EPA has been at the vanguard of environmental rights for over 50 years, but with Scott Pruitt at the helm as the EPA’s administrator we have seen the organization begin to turn on the one thing it was created to protect.
Scott Pruitt was appointed as the EPA’s administrator by President Donald Trump on February 17, 2017, and was confirmed by the senate in a 52-46 vote. Before his appointment as the EPA’s administrator, Pruitt was serving as Oklahoma’s Attorney General. As attorney general, Pruitt eliminated the offices’ environmental enforcement unit and instead created a “Federalism unit” to combat what he considered overreach by the federal government. Now that he is the administrator of the EPA, he has worked to dismantle the organization from the inside out. He has appointed several members of the agency that deny climate change science, and has endorsed cutting the EPA’s budget.
Evidence of Pruitt’s preference for business interests over public interests can be seen well before he was appointed as the administrator of the EPA. Pruitt, while still acting as Attorney General of Oklahoma, wrote a letter to the EPA in which he accused the EPA of grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution being caused by drilling new natural gas wells in Oklahoma. In a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation by the New York Times, it was revealed that the letter Pruitt sent to the EPA was almost a word for word copy of a letter that was sent to Pruitt by attorneys from Devon Energy, one of the largest oil and gas companies in Oklahoma.
The oil and gas industry had been one of the biggest backers of Pruitt while he ran for the office of Attorney General of Oklahoma, and it is highly doubtful that those ties have been severed since he took the office of administrator for the EPA. It would be ridiculous to expect Pruitt, or anyone for that matter, to completely abandon their ideals and political beliefs when they assume a new office. However, if one is going into the office of an organization that they have been legally battling for years and has also shown open hostility towards the goals of that organization, then it makes absolutely no sense for that person to run the organization. The mission of the EPA is to reasonably protect the environment from destruction, which naturally would mean that the EPA is going to challenge any company that want to drill, deforest, or drastically change the environment in any way. By appointing Pruitt to the administrator position, President Trump has failed in his duty to appoint a proper head to the EPA.
Sources:
https://www.epa.gov/history